To understand the sensual pleasure of knowledge, no small amount of perversion is necessary. And to communicate this fetish, whether ironically or not, to which we intemperately yield as those who choose or suffer to clothe the brain with a caressable skin, no small amount of skill is required. Somewhere at the center of this novel, that gaze palpitates, the sensuality of words, of reflections, of the great arguments with which we enclose the void; the eroticism of walking on the invisible rope that connects two or more cornices of nothing. The book and the brotherhood is, from that logic, a novel of love, of platonic and wild love, of agape and violent love, of sublime and selfish love.
The anecdote could descend into fatal boredom if the writer were not so competent in her craft. A group of friends who enter early old age live with nostalgia the dissolution of proximity caused by age, while they long, with a certain candor, for their university days. The pages are full of small rituals, of inherited wealth and work in ministries, of conversations about theories and philosophy: little action, at first glance, but a sustained tension in the words that the characters exchange. Well, I once again rescue the skill of Murdoch, who builds with the fog of drowsiness firm stones that she piles in labyrinthine spirals, and thus manages to give solidity to the liquid so that what could be vapor reveals, as we read, a forest, a castle, a house. Great mastery of the word is necessary to be able to enter thus into the human, without historical drama, to narrate the absurdity of the void and to establish on it the inevitability of love.
Because I affirm it again: this is a novel of love, and then there is passion, and doubt, and communion, and redemption, and violence, and tenderness. This is a novel of love, but Murdoch seems to insist in each scene that that, love, is not a theme among other themes, but the only great possible theme, the only theme that makes sense to narrate and live, the only one of the human searches that is capable of elevating us, of distancing us from our condition of ephemeral beings conscious of their mortality, of granting us —for brief instants, that's okay— the gift of the complete, of the full, the subtle caress of the sublime. Murdoch lives love from a committed Platonism, without eluding imperfections or pains, considering, on the contrary, that all that is part of the totality.
I have favorite scenes in the novel. A frozen river on which the characters dance skating, a parrot and its black nails that draw blood, a frozen garden where fireworks sparkle, a basement and a door that opens at the worst moment. And the party, the party at the beginning of the book, those fifteen or twenty pages with which the author presents us with the characters, in a single rapid, enumerative vertigo, drunk, staggering. Party, pure party of the word, pure party of the word conjugated from excess: an event that only an excellent hostess would be capable of making enjoyable, saving it from the mire, from incomprehension, from hermeticism, from boredom due to overstimulation.
Fortunately for us, Murdoch is an excellent narrator. And she makes it clear from the first paragraphs. And she sustains it until the end.
